Laurel, Mississippi - On August 25, immigration agents swooped down on Howard Industries,
a Mississippi electrical equipment factory, taking 481 workers to a privately-run
detention center in Jena, Louisiana. A hundred and six women were also arrested
at the plant, and released wearing electronic monitoring devices on their ankles
if they had children, or without them if they were pregnant. Eight workers were
taken to Federal court in Hattiesburg, where they were charged with aggravated
identity theft.

Afterwards Barbara Gonzalez, spokesperson for the Bureau of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), stated the raid took place because of a tip by a
"union member" two years before. Other media accounts focused on an
incident in which plant workers allegedly cheered as their coworkers were led
away by ICE agents. The articles claim the plant was torn by tension between
immigrant and non-immigrant workers, and that unions in Mississippi are hostile
to immigrants.

Many Mississippi activists and workers, however, charge the raid had a political
agenda - undermining a growing political coalition that threatens the state's
conservative Republican establishment. They also say the raid, which took place
during union contract negotiations, will help the company resist demands for
better wages and conditions.

Jim Evans, a national AFL-CIO staff member in Mississippi and a leading member
of the state legislature's Black Caucus, said he believed "this raid is
an effort to drive immigrants out of Mississippi. It is also an attempt to drive
a wedge between immigrants, African Americans, white people and unions - all
those who want political change here." Patricia Ice, attorney for the Mississippi
Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), agreed that "this is political. They
want a mass exodus of immigrants out of the state, the kind we've seen in Arizona
and Oklahoma. The political establishment here is threatened by Mississippi's
changing demographics, and what the electorate might look like in 20 years."

In the last two decades, the percentage of African Americans in the state's
population has increased to over 35%, and immigrants, who were statistically
insignificant until recently, are expected to reach 10% in the next decade.
Mississippi union membership has been among the nation's lowest, but since the
early 1980s, workers have joined unions in catfish and poultry plants, casinos
and shipyards, along with those at Howard Industries.

Evans, other members of the Black Caucus, many of the state's labor organizations,
and immigrant communities all see shifting demographics as the basis for changing
the state's politics. Over the last seven years their growing coalition has
proposed legislation to set up a Department of Labor (Mississippi is the only
state without one), guarantee access to education for children of all races
and nationalities, and provide drivers' licenses to immigrants. MIRA organized
support in the state capitol for those proposals, and Evans, who sponsored many
of them, chairs MIRA's board.

Earlier this year, however, the legislature passed, and Governor Haley Barbour
signed, a law making it a state felony for an undocumented worker to hold a
job, punishable by 1-5 years in prison and $1,000-10,000 in fines. Employers
are given immunity for employing workers without papers, so long as they vet
new hires through an ICE database called E-Verify. It is still not known whether
the people arrested at Howard Industries will be charged under the new state
law. Evans says the law and the raid serve the same objectives. "They both
just make it easier to exploit workers. The people who profit from Mississippi's
low wage system want to keep it the way it is," he alleged.

In the week before the raid, MIRA organizers received reports of a growing
number of ICE agents in southern Mississippi. They began leafleting immigrant
communities, warning them about a possible raid and explaining their rights
should people be questioned about their immigration status. When agents finally
showed up at the Howard Industries plant, many workers say they tried to invoke
those rights, and warn others that a raid was in progress. One woman, later
detained and then released to care for her child, began to call workers who
had not yet come to the factory on her cell phone, warning them to stay away.
"She first called her brother, and then began calling anyone else she could
think of," explained her mother, who works in a local chicken plant. Both
feared being identified publicly. "An agent grabbed her arm, and asked
her what she was doing, so she went into the bathroom, and kept calling people
until they took her phone away."

Howard Industries, like most Mississippi employers, has a long record of opposing
unions. Workers there chose representation by the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers on June 8, 2000, by a vote of 162-108. Employment at the
plant, which manufactures electrical ballasts and transformers, grew considerably
after the election, and the company now employs over 4000 workers at several
locations in Mississippi. In 2002 it received a $31.5 million subsidy for expansion
from the state government, and at one point state legislators were all given
HI laptop computers. "The company is very well-connected politically,"
says Evans, who noted that its owners donated to the campaigns of former Democratic
governor Ronnie Musgrove, and then to Mississippi's current Republican governor
Haley Barbour.

As it grew, the company hired many immigrant Mexican and Central American workers,
diversifying a workforce that was originally primarily African American and
white. The company has declined to comment, and released a press statement that
said, "Howard Industries runs every check allowed to ascertain the immigration
status of all applicants for jobs. It is company policy that it hires only U.S.
citizens and legal immigrants."

During the organizing drive, the union filed charges with the National Labor
Relations Board, alleging intimidation and violations of workers' rights. After
the union and company agreed on a contract, more charges followed. NLRB Region
15 issued a complaint against the company for violating the union's bargaining
rights. Roger Doolittle, attorney for IBEW Local 1317, says other charges allege
that the company threatened a union steward for trying to represent workers
in the plant. In June, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced
it intended to fine the company $123,000 for 36 violations of health and safety
regulations at the Pendorf plant, where the raid took place, and another $41,000
in fines for a second Laurel location.

Tension between the company and union increased after the collective bargaining
agreement expired at the beginning of August. According to one immigrant worker,
who was not detained because he worked on swing shift and did not want to be
identified, the union was asking for a wage increase of $1.50/hour and better
vacation benefits. Company medical benefits are also an issue among workers,
he said, because family coverage costs over $100/week, putting it out of reach
for most employees.

Mississippi is a right-to-work state, and labor contracts cannot require that
workers belong to the union. Instead, unions must continually try to sign workers
up as members. In past years, according to other union sources, IBEW Local 1317
had a reputation as a union that did not offer much support to its immigrant
members.

According to the swing shift worker, who did not belong to the union, there
were just a few hundred members at the Pendorf plant, and in negotiations the
company used that low membership as a reason not to sign a new agreement.

To increase its ability to negotiate a contract, Local 1317 began making greater
efforts to sign up immigrant members. Spanish-speaking organizers were brought
in, and they handed out leaflets in Spanish explaining the benefits of membership.
They visited workers at home so they could talk about the union without being
overheard or seen by company supervisors. According to the swing shift worker,
many began to join, especially the immigrants who'd been hired most recently.
IBEW's national newspaper, Electrical Worker, reported that over 200 had signed
up last April, according to Local 1317's African-American business manager Clarence
Larkin. "It's a constant process to keep the union alive and growing,"
he told the paper.

That's when the plant was raided. Local 1317 will now have to try to negotiate
a contract after the loss of many of its members, who were among those detained.
Those members, who joined the union in hopes of better wages and treatment,
instead have been imprisoned for days in Jena, Louisiana, a two-hour drive from
Laurel. ICE spokesperson Barbara Gonzalez would not provide an estimate of how
long they might be jailed, but said "the investigation of their cases is
ongoing."

The day after ICE agents stormed the factory, MIRA began organizing meetings
to provide legal advice, food and economic help. According to MIRA director
Bill Chandler, Howard Industry representatives told detainees' families, and
women released to care for children, that the company wouldn't give them their
paychecks. On August 28 MIRA organizer Vicky Cintra led a group of workers to
the Pendorf plant to demand their pay. Managers called Laurel police and sheriffs,
who threatened to arrest her. After workers began chanting, "Let her go!"
and news reporters appeared on the scene, the company finally agreed to distribute
checks to about 70 people.

The swing shift worker was so frightened by the raid that he hadn't gone back
to work after almost a week, and wasn't sure he'd have a job waiting if he did.
"Everyone is still really scared," he said. Doolittle agreed, and
said that fear would affect more than just the workers taken away. "Workers
get apprehensive anytime something like this happens," he said. "That's
just human nature."

Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center,
explained that "raids drive down wages because they intimidate workers,
even citizens and legal residents. The employer brings in another batch of employees
and continues business as usual, while people who protest get targeted and workers
get deported. Raids really demonstrate the employer's power." The Hattiesburg
American reported Friday that Howard Industries sent a letter to customers two
days after the raid, assuring them that production would be back to normal by
the end of the week, and noting that the company has not been charged.

Spokesperson Barbara Gonzalez claimed ICE waited two years after receiving
a call from a "union member" before conducting the raid, because "we
took the time needed for our investigation." She declined to say how that
investigation was conducted, or what led ICE to believe their tip had come from
a union member. The picture of a plant in which union members were hostile to
immigrants was reinforced after the raid by media accounts of an incident in
which workers "applauded" as their coworkers were taken away. But
on August 29, when Cintra and the braceleted women sat in front of the plant
for a second day, demanding more paychecks, African American workers came up
to them as they left work, embraced the women, and told them they supported
them.

"It's hard to believe that a two-year old phone call to ICE led to this
raid, but whether or not the call ever took place, that possibility is a product
of the poisonous atmosphere fostered by politicians of both parties in Mississippi,"
says MIRA director Chandler. "In the last election Barbour and Republicans
campaigned against immigrants to get elected, but so did all the Democratic
statewide candidates except Attorney General Jim Hood. The raid will make the
climate even worse"

During the 2007 election campaign the Ku Klux Klan organized a 500-person rally
in Tupelo, and when MIRA organizer Erik Fleming urged Barbour to veto the bill
making work a felony for the undocumented, he was attacked by state anti-immigrant
organizations.

Some state labor leaders have contributed to anti-immigrant hostility. After
the Howard Industries workers, many of them union members, were arrested, state
AFL-CIO President Robert Shaffer told the Associated Press that he doubted that
immigrants could join unions if they were not in the country legally. U.S. labor
law, however, holds that all workers have union rights, regardless of immigration
status. It also says unions have a duty to represent all members fairly and
equally

"This raid will just make us more determined," Evans declared. "We
won't go back to the kind of racism Mississippi has known throughout its past."